Entries Tagged 'Marketing' ↓

I have been recently viewing the plethora of posts on Facebook, Twitter, etc. from various people and organizations. I assume these people or organizations are attempting to leverage social media as one of their marketing strategies. One thing that was quite alarming was the number of posts that had no follow through in terms of responses to comments made by viewers.

The whole point of utilizing social media is to engage in conversation with your followers or customers. Utilizing social media, as one of your marketing strategies, should not be treated like the traditional approaches; whereby, you shotgun information out on as many mediums as possible in hopes that a percentage of recipients will respond (i.e. leads in traditional marketing terms) and you will be able to convert these into opportunities.

The point of social media is to engage with people in order to learn more about them, and they can learn more about yourself and organization. Only once they feel comfortable, and start to trust you, will there be an opportunity for your business. Now this may sound a little manipulative, in terms of attempting to establish trust, with the intention of try to generate business. However, I believe if you are sincere, whereby you really believe that you are trying to help them with need or a problem, than this shouldn’t be an issue. One of the best definitions for marketing I have ever heard is…

Marketing is getting people who have a specific need or problem to know, like, and trust you.

Remember, the point of using social media is to engage with your followers and customers. Therefore, be sure to take every opportunity to respond to comments made by your viewers.

I have just recently designed, developed and launched a new website for my client Quest Wellness. This was my first website developed on the awesome CMS (Content Management System) Expression Engine. Expression Engine had a bit of a learning curve to it, however once I mastered this I find it to be one the best and most flexible CMS I have ever worked with.

So what else did I do besides the website. I integrated the website blog and event calendar into their Facebook Fan Page and Twitter account. So now when Quest Wellness updates their blog, or adds upcoming events, their social media sites will be updated automatically. Also, the website and relevant pages where optimized for search engines (i.e. Google, Yahoo, etc.) based on key words and phrases.

In terms of measuring the results of these effort I have integrated their website, Fan Page and Twitter account with analytics so that they can see how many visitors the get, how long the visitors stay at the site and what the visitors are looking at. This is important to understand in order to determine which of their marketing activities are successful.

If you would like to learn more about this project, or what I could do for your company or organization, please do not hesitate to contact me.

As a continuation on my series of blog posts describing what small business and entrepreneurs can do to improve their Internet presence, I am going to discuss in this post how to measures the traffic to ones website.  Also, before starting any initiative to increase traffic to your website it’s important to be able to measure the effectiveness of each approach. 

Like the saying goes… “you can’t improve what you can’t measure” – not sure who actually said that?

In order to measure the effectiveness of your site and any initiatives to increase traffic, I recommend implementing a web analytics tool on your site.  A web analytics tool allows you measure the traffic that to your website, and some of the important metrics one would look at are:

• Visitors and Location – how many total/new visitors you are getting on your site, and where the visitors are coming from geographically.
• Content Overview – tracks what pages on your website are being viewed.
• Bounce Rate – the percentage of visitors that leave your site right without looking at other pages on your site.
• Traffic Sources – the sources of traffic to your site, this is measured in direct traffic, referring sites and search engines.

I believe the first two metrics are self explanatory in terms of their  value.  The Bounce Rate metric is important because it indicates, if the percentage is high, that your website may not be that interesting to the visitors.  The last metric Traffic Sources is very important, especially if you have implemented some social media strategies (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to increase traffic to your site.  Also, the search engine measurement determine who many visitors are find your site through services like Google, Yahoo, etc.

The most widely analytics tool, and the one I use personally, is Google Analytics.  It is free service from Google which is not terribly difficult to setup and configure on your sites. Basically what happens is that you enter the address of your site in Google Analytics, and then it give you a few lines of codes that you copy/paste into each of your web pages. I know, sure it sounds simple, but unless you are comfortable with updating your web pages you may want help in setting this up.

After a few hours Google Analytics will start collecting data about the traffic and visitors to your website.  Then you can start implementing the various strategies and actually measure and see which ones are working for you.  Good luck and if you need any help don’t hesitate to contact ThreeGears!

I have spoken with many small businesses and start-up entrepreneurs, and in these discussions I find that most of them take the initial step of creating a website.  These sites vary from website services that allow you to build your own website, to those that cost in the thousands of dollars made by professional web developers.  The first few questions I ask them are:

• What value are you getting from your website?
• Is anyone actually viewing your website?
• What have you done to attract more visitors to your website?

Most of the responses are "it is a means to promote my business" (which is vary true); however the second question is usually answered by "I don’t know".  The last question is usually answered with something like… the site is on my business cards and brochures – yes but this means you have to find your customers first before they become aware of your website and your business.  One of the main goals of a website is to find new customers for you… or better said let customer find you!

I am starting this series of blogs posts to describe various strategies that a small business or entrepreneurs can implement cost-effectively that can help promote your business via the Internet, thus attracting you new customers.

Remember, "build it they will come" only works in the movie Field of Dreams!